Our survey of companies quoted on Euronext Brussels, shows that 66% of them has a cloud strategy.

Most (79%) have a private cloud. 17% set up a hybrid cloud. 4% use a public cloud.

The 33% of companies that doesn’t have a cloud strategy chooses not to go to the cloud because they feel that they have less control.

They prefer to manage their IT infrastructure internally, to ensure business continuity. It’s mainly real estate and industrial companies that choose not to go to the cloud.

This means for one thing that a number of companies has yet to be convinced that the cloud really can be safe. On the other hand, some companies fear that their business continuity may be jeopardized if they don’t ‘control’ their IT completely (meaning: in house, where they can actually see it). On the other hand, if they only have one data center, and they never really test their power backup, safety really is an illusion.

Our very own interpretation of the results is also that, to many people, like the 33% in our survey that chooses not to go to the cloud, ‘the cloud’ they know is the public cloud. Business people, as opposed to IT-people, don’t necessarily know that there is something like a private cloud, where you still manage your IT yourself if you want to. Where cloud technology, developed at first for public clouds, is brought to your personal infrastructure to give you the benefits of the cloud as well as full control. There are safe and less safe, and pricy as well as more affordable solutions in both public and private cloud solutions. And there’s the hybrid solution as well, combining both. The difference still is that you can’t go to your server room or data center and look at your infrastructure. So there remains a mental barrier to cross… We come across quite a few CIO’s that have difficulties convincing their management and/or their Board to go to the cloud. The lack of knowledge about the cloud is probably the reason why.

The truth is that IT is not an exact science, and the market isn’t transparent. People have their own opinion about which is the best solution. There is no such thing as an objective measurement of the risk involved in different scenario’s. Fact and myth are intertwined. On the other hand: people learn when things go wrong, but they sometimes close their eyes for the learnings of others. There have yet to come more examples of companies having to shut down operations due to a power outage or another ‘disaster’.

We at LCL will continue our plead for secure data, in a secure housing environment. That is the one sure thing we can offer you!

Watch the video made by Kanaal Z about our survey on our YouTube channel.
– Dutch version
– French version